Birthplace of gig-glorified servants grabbing groceries for the efficiently entitled. (Has this city met a chore it couldn’t outsource?) Higher taxes. Fewer jobs. Steeper rents. More traffic. Substandard home appliances.
San Francisco is making me less ambitious.
Do you ever hear about people leaving, like Chicago or Mobile?
Alas, all of the above run through my head a few times a year, like a tropical storm, or communication from an estranged family member, maybe the urge to stalk an ex-lover. The diatribes circulate in local media often, but you’ll notice those far off or newly arrived pipe up too.
They blog, they post it on Youtube, they Tweet. Whatever the medium, there is never a shortage of writing, quite ardently, on the decline of San Francisco.
I’ve read journalists lament a loss of culture and amalgamations of feces; I’ve heard tech workers (I’m being very generous here) lose their voice shrieking about the needles and unhoused people, and I refuse to watch the TikTokification of how to segregate myself from these problems. Sometimes, sometimes, it’s long-term locals too. But the tone and intent remain the same.
They think they are the first to see the corruption and disparities, that they are nobly taking on the canary role for all those aspiring to get into this coal mine by the Bay. SFGate even used to have a dedicated “exodus” reporter covering people leaving, because I guess enough of us thought it was news.
I‘ve been to many of the places you see in Thrillist articles or influencer feeds you do; a lot of them, I admit, are pretty fun.
Do you ever hear about people leaving, like Chicago or Mobile?
I’ve read many of these kinds of articles over the years, mostly to share them with friends to sigh at the chronic maladies that still plague the city, then laugh at how bizarre these people’s expectations are for this place. Small as we are, ravenously at war for housing and government transparency and a police force that doesn’t suck, it always feels like they’re describing a completely different place.
I can’t really say anything about them now, though, because I did the same. On August 7, I left.
Let’s rewind. I was born and raised in San Francisco and like everyone else, have a huge ego about it. I grew up in Bernal Heights, the side that ran along Cesar Chavez, or Army Street, as some of you have known it to be. I went to Spanish immersion school in the Mission, then matriculated through middle and high school in the Sunset, all public. I have scurried for most of my life between these neighborhoods and beyond, for a party or a play or a sleepover. I’ve been to many of the places you see in Thrillist articles or influencer feeds you do; a lot of them, I admit, are pretty fun.
I felt safe, for a number of years, in my world; it was fully mapped and I knew what to expect.
But mostly, I lived outside the margins of Instagrammable restaurants and well-lit cocktail bars, preferring the dingier neighborhood spots, those that survived. I never went to the Marina unless it was to see my orthodontist, and I definitely never went to Pac Heights. I took the bus everywhere, and still don’t drive. I’ve held some kind of job since I was 14; where would an allowance come from between a nurse and special education teacher when the cost of living is what it is? But that never weighed on me; most of my friends worked too. I’ve been assaulted, my place of work nearly “looted.” None of these were dealbreakers.
I knew, though, that I wanted to get out when college app season loomed ahead of my senior year of high school, as did everyone else. Hindsight being what it is, I don’t think I left for the right reasons and didn’t really think about where I was going; mostly, I can admit I left simply so I could go around introducing myself as someone who was really from San Francisco, and chastising those who claimed they were. Vancouver, BC (that’s Canada, btw) seemed a lot like San Francisco; inequal, liberal, cloudy. It decidedly was not like San Francisco, because nowhere is.
I lasted two years before I withdrew from that university and did what seemed like the most obvious choice, but one so few of us are afforded: I came home.
Both San Francisco and I had changed by then. All the problems became sharper, the vestiges of my childhood replaced with startups and franchises. The Frisco Five were on a hunger strike; elected and appointed officials were committing fraud (we just didn’t know it yet), I was taking a census of childhood acquaintances whose family had been evicted and would never return. I did not think I would be home so soon or stay for long and began applying to disparate colleges, thinking I would get out after a semester at City.
But I didn’t. I stayed, got a very San Francisco job in the weed industry, fell in love for the first time. I enrolled in SFSU, a school I didn’t think twice about in my applications to schools on the East Coast or in Portland, and started focusing on my writing again via journalism. I started retracing those paths of my adolescence and finding joy in burrowing into a version of the city the think-pieces still haven’t found.
I felt safe, for a number of years, in my world; it was fully mapped and I knew what to expect. Then, not so much slower, but very all at once, graduation was around the corner and what to do once my diploma was no longer theoretical grew like a dark mass inside me.
And then, a third of the way through my final semester, a global pandemic coupled with our country’s federal mismanagement, and we were all headed inside with nowhere to go. I saw San Francisco hollow out, and you probably did too. There was silence every time I walked from my BART stop after a shift of “essential working.” Like a rat, I had developed my internal maze of the city, and now, where I expected a journey to end in joy, there was simply nothing. My family and I all moved in together and made days out of the cay blocks of quarantine time with dog walks, edibles, and lots of reality TV.
Then, fuck, it was 2021.
I was soon a Pfizer hottie, and ready to get a real job and stop freelancing from the floor of my parent’s attic. I honestly can’t quantify how many iterations of the same cover letter I wrote, and how many people I created via my resume and LinkedIn, desperate to be what a hiring manager was looking for.
I left because I got a job, and it was based in New York City.
A lot of these jobs were remote or Bay Area-based, but as the summer that was decidedly not hot and evidently not as vaxxed as we needed to be worn on, I smoked a lot of weed and ruminated on what I wanted to do with my life now that I was 26 and having to survive as a real adult being. And I knew I had to get the fuck out of this place.
The why, of course, isn’t all that compelling. It never really is. I left not because I was particularly anxious about money, though it was depressing to think I would never be able to buy a house like my parents. It was never because of danger or crime or the visibility of how our mayor could care less about the unhoused, impoverished, or mentally ill. I hated the techies, their bad taste in everything, and the inflation their presence brought to the non-wealthy. But it never overtook the brilliant minds, the eccentric style, the people fully realized in the love of being here who went unmentioned in these pieces of exodus porn.
San Francisco has never been ours to project fantasies onto, and I feel like I finally stopped waiting for the place I called home, the oasis of my past, to also be my future.
I left because I got a job, and it was based in New York City. It doesn’t pay six figures, and I’m still very much freelancing on top of my 40 hour week, but it’s in my field and I now have an office with a Dell computer to go to and people to message on Slack and an email address that isn’t my Gmail account I made in high school.
It occurred to me, only when I finally opened the Google Doc that would become this essay, that I didn’t ever really listen to any music, ever really, that was about San Francisco, minus a hyphy anthem or a “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” here and there. Admittedly, I listened to a lot of “concrete jungle wet dream tomato” songs on my red-eye plane ride to JFK, and now that I’ve been gone nearly 3 months, I find myself caught in bouts of homesickness.
So, I googled, quite simply, “songs about San Francisco.” Many, if not most, are from the 1960s, and all appear to be the kind of song written to be performed whilst dropping acid in Golden Gate Park, which, yeah. The more contemporary songs are usually by rappers, with an odd rock anthem here and there.
I lived in San Francisco for 23 years total before I left, and I would live 23 more if I felt like the city actively wanted me there, or could make room for my ambitions. It just doesn’t.
But in these songs, between the psychedelic interludes and long notes and straight bars, are a much closer version of the world I knew. There is ugliness in these songs if you know how to listen, and allusions to the unseen. These songs were not written by people with iPhone 13s or MBAs; grind is the sonic foundation, and the plight is intrinsic to the whimsy. It endures despite hemorrhaging those who have laid the soil and seeds before us.
I feel it is also necessary here to recognize that what we call San Francisco is unceded Raymatush Ohlone land and that it exists as a product of genocide and theft. Other Ohlone people, including the Chochenyo and the Karkin in the East Bay, the Yokuts in the South Bay and Central Valley, and the Muwekma tribe throughout the region continue to live among us.
San Francisco has never been ours to project fantasies onto, and I feel like I finally stopped waiting for the place I called home, the oasis of my past, to also be my future. Now I just project that onto Brooklyn, where I live now, home of the Lenape.
It is still dizzying to me to be typing this from my third-floor bedroom in Bushwick rather than my childhood bedroom, to wake up with the sun at a new angle in the sky, and to walk so many flat blocks in a row.
I lived in San Francisco for 23 years total before I left, and I would live 23 more if I felt like the city actively wanted me there, or could make room for my ambitions. It just doesn’t. I am far from an outlier, but whether it be the size, the dominant economies, the reality that I may have had to keep living in my parents’ house, San Francisco didn’t have a place for me at this phase of my life. So, within a week of signing my offer letter, I was gone.
The Hill recently published an article on the results of a poll: “More than half of Bay Area residents plan to leave permanently.”
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A harrowing headline, through and through, gave way to figures like “among those who were likely to leave, 84 percent cited the cost of living as a major reason, 77 percent specifically cited high housing costs and 62 percent cited the quality of life. Then I scrolled down. The poll was conducted by an organization called “Joint Venture Silicon Valley,” based on the responses of 1,610 people across five Bay Area counties. These counties have a combined population of nearly 6.5 million people; who is really leaving?
Most of my m childhood friends and my nuclear family are still in the city for now, despite my mom’s annual denouncement of the place. And yet every year, she doesn’t sell the house, she doesn’t quit her job, she throws another birthday party in her kitchen. I think about the city daily and still follow local news.
People are still leaving, I guess, but you never really hear about the college graduates, who get evicted because they can’t find work, the families who get laid off, the people for whom a move out of the Bay Area with no remote job or office in Austin, Portland, Chicago.
I wonder about all the people who never had a choice, and would likely have stayed the rest of their days on this warming Earth in 49 square miles. And I hope that in the space left by my absence, someone who appreciates the city for what it is can thrive.
